December 164:20 p.m.

Darker, more moody here than the Juárez cafe. More
angular, darker. But this El Paso cafe is all about
moodiness, angularity. That's why I liked it so. Odd that a
city with just a handful of hideaways offers such a distinct
one. I looked for its equivalent in Tucson, in San Diego.
One or two paralleled it, but the mood here is really its
own.

The walls are darker now than they were that night.
Paintings still hang. And the small tables are still
awkwardly shaped. The most radical of them--the triangles,
the crosses--absent. Ownership change possibly. I sat at
that table over there as it all began--But just as it all
began. Usually I sat at this corner table.

An unfamiliar countergirl concocts drinks now familiar
to me. Unfamiliar music wafts from the familiarly hung
speakers. Then it was REM over and over again. That one
CD with the song about losing one's religion. That whole CD
they would play--all of the time. That music means El Paso
to me like none other. That and the Mexican dance number La
Pachanga. Those make up the dissonantly surreal soundtrack
to those events.

The pay telephone stands still where it did. What a
scourging that--dialing that number repeatedly, realizing
what no answer meant, sensing somehow psychically what no
answer meant, being powerless to prevent it, being so far
away. Strange to sit here now so calmly, so distant; to sit
here where it all ended, where it all began.

Not far from here, up the street--Kern. A picturesque
neighborhood of stucco bungalows. Some months afterward I
would lie there on my back in its park under a flowering
Hawthorne bush and watch the suckling bees and rhapsodically
scribble something cloying about rebirth, renascence,
resurrection. It was a merciful spring that one, like none
other I've seen; mercy incarnate, its luster.

I bought saddle blankets today for my father and his
wife. I bought my sister and her husband their Christmas
gifts yesterday--Baja jackets.

I mentioned this morning that this trip began eight or
nine weeks ago. I mentioned this and then stopped
scribbling. This stopping was good because it meant that
after a rather listless thumbing of my worn copy of Idylls of
the King I could converse with a third old man who sat down
at la güera's counter. He would practice his English, he told
la güera. But he did not need practice. He had been a
bartender in Los Angeles, in San Fransisco, in San Jose and
New York. He was retired. "Grande," he told la güera. And
independently then, and quite magniloquently even, the old
man confirmed that that warm cafe in which we were there
comfortably sitting and partaking of our delicious cafés con
leche was the finest establishment for good coffee in either
the fine city of El Paso or the fine city of Ciudad Juárez.
I nodded in agreement. It became understood soon I was a
would-be writer, travelling. Ensued comments on literature:
"I have read all of the Russians and the French," the old man
told me. "Including Malraux and Proust." He described for
me then Paris and all the famous gravesites he had visited.
"Victor Hugo!" he said. "Jim Morrison!" he said. He wore a
necktie and a thick warm heavily woven coat. His name was
Tony and he called la güera "muñeca." La güera halted before
us when he called her this. La güera looked at me. La güera
said to me, "Your eyes are very pretty." And as my pretty
eyes widened, I thanked her. And I thought then about Sandra
and Deborah. And I decided that if nothing worked out with
Deborah I would probably give up on American women; I would
probably move to Guadalajara for a wife, or forswear wives
altogether, vow myself to solitude.

This is a good cafe to scribble in.

I want to wash my face.

I will continue on to Albuquerque in just hours.

And the weather even recalls that night. It too was
cold. My nose has run today in my bicycling from the First
Baptist Church to downtown El Paso, to that Juárez cafe, to the
nearby university, to this El Paso cafe just as it ran that
night in my bicycling from my apartment to a nearby gas
station, to a distant shopping mall's parking lot, to Kern, to
so many other random sites through those brutal aimless
directionless circles of pain. Just before Christmas that
was. I'm loathe to read what I scribbled through those
traumas--those naked convulsions. They lie somewhere in a
box, in a spiral of paper. I am better able to describe it
all now--now from this distance.

El Paso is not the same--now from this distance. I was
so glad to leave this city. Too traditional, conservative.
Would that San Diego could be this Mexican! Dubious. But
that's all San Diego lacks for me--That soup of haze of
ambience that El Paso sits in.

I wonder where that countergirl with the fleshy lips
went? Where she is now? And the one whose hair was so black.
Painted it must have been. I almost asked her once.

I'm tired of scribbling this. I will stop now. This
trip really began when I first contemplated scribbling these
notes. I was in San Diego then. Now I'm in El Paso.